Eleanor Burgess’ “Wife of a Salesman” has a fascinating premise: What if Linda Loman, the wife of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s great drama “Death of a Salesman,” showed up at the home of the unnamed woman with whom Willy had the affair that wrecks his family? What would she say? What might she do?
Alas, the resultant show, premiering at Writers Theatre in Glencoe, is a jumbled and confounding clunker. To put it bluntly, very little of what appeared on stage at Friday night’s opening felt even remotely truthful.
And this is despite the presence of two world-class actresses in Kate Fry and Amanda Drinkall. The piece feels incomplete, confused, misdirected and, frankly, should not have been fully produced in this state. Not at up to $90 a ticket.
In academic circles, Linda Loman is typically referred to as a problematic character, being as it appears that Miller has written her with little agency over her own life; she’s merely an enabling mouthpiece for the men in her family, a standard seminar view goes. I’d argue that’s a simplistic reading of Linda, a woman who thinks and speaks deeply of existential, political and social matters, but that’s not my issue with this show.
I thought Burgess would take this character and explore the sides we don’t see to the story, as Bruce Norris did with “Clybourne Park,” a rich conversation with Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” I thought maybe we’d come to know Linda better, as she deserves.
Alas, the character that emerges in this work is yet more of a stereotype than the one in the original play; such are the perils, of course, of riffing on the work of great writers. Instead of Linda (Fry) with agency, we get Linda as a stereotypical 1949 wife, stiff attitude, prim suit and all, arguing with a woman who feels like a charmless ersatz version of Marilyn Monroe (Drinkall). Miller didn’t originally give The Woman much stage time, but she’s still more complex than the character presented here. The Woman is the amoral sensualist; Linda is the good wife and mother. I suspect some of the older members of the audience in Glencoe might well find this binary portrait of 1950-ish women insulting, although that is not the intent.
The first scene, it turns out, is what they call in the business a misdirect, not unlike Jeremy O. Harris’ skilled strategy with “Slave Play,” only much less believable. Lights change and we then meet the two contemporary actresses playing the characters. You might think this explains why their period characters are so inauthentic. But that’s a huge mistake on director Jo Bonney’s part: We’re actually watching the play-within-a-play for a long time, so we still need to fully believe in that too, otherwise, the misdirect won’t actually work. All of these meta-levels need careful charting.
Yet more improbably, we don’t suddenly snap to a credible reality in the outer play. At this point, a goofy director, played by Rom Barkhordar, shows up. The two actresses discuss their characters. Here again, this could be a fascinating exploration, but you don’t ever feel like the writer has figured out what she wants her characters to say and thus the actors/characters talk mostly in circles. The director is too bizarre to be real and, in this confounding production, it feels like nobody is actually looking each other in the eye or even occupying the same space. The playwright even puts herself in the play, in absentia, of all things.
There are a few laughs and, for sure, also some telling observations about the way the American theater has so often treated the women on whom it relies. But in the outer play, the entire conversation is almost entirely about a man, which seems to defeat the purpose. I imagine Burgess planned to use that as a contrast with her other reality, but nothing is ever clear nor specific enough there for any clear intent to come across. It’s all a muddle.
“Attention must be paid,” is Linda’s most famous line. A lesson lies therein.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Wife of a Salesman”
When: Through April 3
Where: Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Tickets: $35-$90 at 847-242-6000 or www.writerstheatre.org
